I’m a fan of push notifications. If tried and refined per app, they’re tremendously useful. Basically the contemporary equivalent of having a personal assistant in many ways.

There are still some major areas where push notifications aren’t even really an option, which I’m frankly surprised by at this point.

One of those is with podcasting, though Overcast is an exception. It’s great being notified of a freshly released episode, because while I like certain podcasts I’m not in love with any of them enough to actively remember to check.

Another area without notifications is books. Neither Kindle nor iBooks have options to push notify for useful scenarios. What if one of my books receives an update? What if a favorite author releases a new book? What if I made progress in a recent book but haven’t opened it in the last few days, or weeks? I should be able to choose push notifications for these scenarios. And it’s a fact that I don’t open iBooks as much as I should considering what I have in my library.

And probably the biggest area that push notifications should exist but don’t really is for websites. Change seems to be afoot, somewhat. As of OS X Yosemite, sites can prompt for notifications. But on iPhone/iPad, it’s frustrating that I can’t opt to receive push notifications for new posts from favorite sites, blogs, etc. Medium does their in their iOS app for authors you follow, which is great. I hope WordPress incorporates this with their Reader stream at some point.

There are plenty of sites that don’t post frequently enough to be worth a place in bookmarks or favorites, but that I’d like to hear from when they post sporadically. And I’d like to be able to do that simply rather than hacking together a workaround solution.